Malcolm in the Middle doesn't especially need me to defend its legacy. It was a long-running hit. It made Bryan Cranston into a star, and set him up for the amazing double-header of Malcolm and Breaking Bad. Frankie Muniz became a movie leading man for a while off of it. It won Emmys (though oddly, never for Cranston or Jane Kaczmarek). Its theme song, "Boss of Me," won alt-rock staples They Might Be Giants their first Grammy, and it was an early 2000s radio hit.
Yet even now, as Muniz, Cranston, Kaczmarek, and most of the surviving cast have reunited for the Hulu miniseries Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair, it feels like another part of the show's cultural footprint isn't fully appreciated. It's one of the two or three most influential sitcoms of this century.
Alan Sepinwall
When Malcolm debuted in January of 2000, the idea of a single-camera comedy — shot on film like a movie or a drama series, with multiple locations and no recorded laughter — was anathema to most of the TV business. The previous decade was littered with single-camera shows that critics liked but audiences ignored. Meanwhile, most of the big Nineties comedy hits were traditional multi-camera shows like Seinfeld and Friends, recorded on a stage in front of a raucous live studio audience, the way most sitcoms had been made since the days of I Love Lucy in the Fifties. I began covering TV in the mid-Nineties, and more than once drew disdainful looks, comments, and/or gestures when I would ask a network executive why they weren't more willing to try single-cam shows.
The biggest exceptions to the multi-cam rule at the time were The Simpsons and other Fox animated shows like King of the Hill. Writer Linwood Boomer had essentially designed Malcolm as a live-action cartoon, with an exaggerated level of reality, lots of violence and other mayhem that would have left Cranston's panicked dad Hal a mutilated invalid if it all actually happened to him, and other reality-bending flourishes. Fox not coincidentally scheduled Malcolm to debut right after The Simpsons, and fans of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie immediately took to financially strapped Hal and Lois (Kaczmarek), their unruly sons Francis (Christopher Kennedy Masterson), Reese (Justin Berfield), Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan), and genius middle child Malcolm (Muniz). In fact, in that first season Malcolm wound up with bigger ratings than its lead-in.